Report from Child Soldier Witness at ICC Lubanga Trial

Institute for War and Peace Reporting, London, Rachel Irwin, 15 June 2009

The Hague — Children joined Thomas Lubanga’s militia to avenge the murders of family and friends, a witness told prosecutors at the International Criminal Court, ICC, this week.

“They had just arrived from their homes,” explained the unnamed witness, identified as a former soldier in the Union of Congolese Patriots, UPC, who also trained young recruits.

“Many had lost their parents [in attacks on their villages] … and joined the army in order to get vengeance.” The witness said that he trained children as young as 14 to use weapons at the UPC’s training centre in the village of Mandro, about 19 kilometres outside the Ituri town of Bunia.

Many of the younger child soldiers made their own toys and played marbles when they weren’t learning to shoot, he added.

“They were always on the ground playing little games,” said the witness. “You could see that they were children.” Lubanga is charged with recruiting, conscripting, and using child soldiers, defined as fighters under the age of 15, in the ethnic conflicts that raged in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC during 2002 and 2003.

The witness said the young soldiers in training included girls as well as boys, “I did not see big girls in Mandro [training camp], only little girls,” he explained. “It was these girls who were doing the cooking for everyone.”

The witness said he knew that the girls were young because they liked to make braids with long blades of grass. “A person who does this is someone who has not reached an age of maturity,” he said.